31 March 1974
These memoirs are written and presented to Stephanie, Kellie and Grant Miocevich by their grandfather, Keighley Edward Graham, so that they will know something of the doings and whereabouts of their forebears.
Your grandfather was born in Winnipeg, in the Province of Manitoba, Canada on 29 April 1904. His father had come out from England as a new settler and took up a quarter section (160 acres) four miles from Jasmin, which was on the railway. Whether the railway passed through when I was born I cannot say. But I can clearly remember waiting on the haystack with my elder brother, Alfy, for my parents to come home from Fort Qu’Appelle, 50 miles away where they had driven for the day.
Figure 1: Map of Quarter Sections near Jasmin and Ituna,
Saskatchewan, Canada.
Edward Francis Irvine Graham’s Quarter
Section (shown with arrow) was located at Part NW, Section 30, Township
25, Range 12, Longitude Meridian W2. It is now owned by Ruth Bruce,
whose son, Daryl, farms the land.
On the map which I have before me today I cannot find any of these places. As far as I know I never had a birth certificate. Up to [this day] I have always got through with my baptismal certificate. A Mr and Mrs Jobson was our nearest neighbour at the time I was christened in the little church at Ituna which I cannot see on this map.
Figure 2: St George’s Anglican Church, Ituna,
Canada, prior to relocation in 2003.
St George’s Church started in July 1910
through the operations of the Railway Mission. Grant Miocevich, Keighley’s
grandson, is pictured, having visited the Church in 2003 just before
it was disassembled and moved to Copper Basin, Arizona, where it stands
today.
Your grandfather had four brothers who were born in different parts of the world. My elder brother, Alfy [Alfred], was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa in January 1902; Eric was born on 24 October 1907; Pat on 11 March 1914; and Lionel on 4 November 1916. Long before my time, my parents’ first child, Jack, was accidentally shot in the Boer War in 1901 and the only sister I would ever have had died from Enteric Fever, caught from her mother, at the early age of two months. Yes, Dad moved around a lot but, unlike myself, was not brought up to work. And as you will hear later on in this journal, the ideas and aspirations of those times were so entirely different from today.
Figure 3: The Graham Family in Saskatchewan, Canada
Top: Unknown* (left), Edward Francis Irvine Graham (centre) and Beatrice
Graham, his wife.
Middle: Colonel John Higgin Graham (left seated), Unknown* (right seated)
and Eric Graham (child right seated);
Bottom: Keighley Edward Graham (left seated) and Alfred
Francis Irvine Graham (right seated)
